Conficker’s estimated economic cost? $9.1 billion

“Despite that their analysis also considered a much limited
infection rate (200,000 infected hosts), they claim that the cost
of the virus in this case is still around $200 million. The
research excludes an important fact though – not only is Conficker
still active and infecting, but also, according to the most recent
infection rate estimate courtesy of the Conficker Working Group,
the number of infected hosts is 3.5 million.

“Here are more details from the analysis:

“”Any analysis of the true impact of Conficker must also factor
in the (wasted) time, resources, and energies of the
cyber-community, governments, companies and individuals.
Extrapolating out from studies on the average cost of similar past
attacks, the total economic cost of this worm (including the cost
of efforts to combat the worm, the cost of purchasing
counter-measure software) could be as high as $9.1 billion. Even
using the single, outlying data source that suggests a much more
limited scope of infection (<200,000 –vastly less than all
other sources suggest–the cost of this virus is still roughly $200
million dollars.””
(The article ends with “Personally, I never take these rough
estimates seriously.” If only this minimal level of skepticism were
applied uniformly, across all of the Windows press– ed.)

Complete
Story